this is legitimately one of my top five favorite kakashi scenes.
i love seeing kakashi break the rules in the name of doing the right thing, and this scene especially is particularly satisfying to me, because his moment of defiance here is, to my mind, long overdue.
one of my eternal frustrations in early naruto is how the leaf village administration gives kakashi the job of caring for a group of super high-needs children and then continually makes that job as difficult for him as possible. they task him with being solely responsible for the development and well-being of three twelve year-olds - a group that includes naruto (a walking disaster with a god’s power trapped inside his body) and sasuke (a genocide survivor fixated on killing his own brother), BOTH of whom are being hunted by different groups of supercriminals - and then the village keeps getting in kakashi’s way or dropping the ball or actively ordering him to prioritize other things.
so much of what goes wrong with the kids in this period is the result of other people interfering with kakashi’s work or being negligent or endangering the kids/putting kakashi in impossible positions. team 7’s first big mission sets the tone for everything that comes after, with someone else’s lie putting kakashi in a situation where he has to single-handedly protect not just the client who deceived him, but the three children who were supposed to be the clients’ other protectors. and after that, the list just multiplies:
ten anbu operatives can’t manage to protect sasuke’s hospital room from orochimaru’s minions, so kakashi has to do it himself and then whisk sasuke out of the village for a month, leaving naruto in the hands of a substitute and sakura with her parents
genma orders sasuke to chase after gaara when the chunin exams blow up, saying “you’re at chunin level already,” which forces kakashi to immediately dispatch more kids to bring him back, because “ffs NO i do NOT want him out there doing that why the fuck would you tell him to do that?!”
aoba runs his mouth off about itachi when sasuke is standing RIGHT THERE, instantly undoing all the work kakashi just did to prevent itachi and sasuke from coming anywhere near each other (and thus sending sasuke to that disastrous first encounter, the outcome of which ultimately leads to sasuke’s defection)
jiraiya decides he should let sasuke try to fight itachi himself, “out of respect for the boy’s feelings,” leading to sasuke ending up in a tsukuyomi coma
tsunade orders kakashi to drop his teaching work and leave the village on a mission even though a) he’s just gotten out of his own torture-induced coma and b) sasuke is having a crisis that kakashi is trying to manage
and then when kakashi gets back from that mission and finds out that surprise, all of this meddling has led to a disaster, tsunade tries to order him away AGAIN
but this time - he just says no.
he walks right out of her office. he turns his back on her. and there is NOTHING i love more than seeing kakashi embody the philosophy that he’s chosen to adopt as his guiding light: those who break the rules are scum. but those who abandon their friends are worse than scum.
it’s not that he doesn’t understand where tsunade is coming from here. but he knows she’s wrong. she’s making her decisions based solely on concerns about the Leaf Village being in a tight spot - feeling like they can’t turn down missions because they’ll appear weak and thus become vulnerable to attack when they’re already operating at half strength. she sends a group of twelve year-olds to bring sasuke back because supposedly the village can’t spare anyone else, “even if it means letting the sharingan fall into orochimaru’s hands” - but like. it’s not the sharingan. it’s a child. sasuke isn’t just a repository for his hereditary jutsu; he’s not a pair of eyes to be passed around from one wielder to the next. he’s a human child.
tsunade doesn’t know sasuke. she’s new to the situation and doesn’t know enough about it to understand how serious it is. i don’t even think she was still in the village when the uchiha massacre occurred; the timeline makes it sound like she left long before that. she doesn’t really understand who sasuke is or how much trouble he’s in - she makes her decision because she feels like her first priority has to be the well-being of the Leaf as a whole, not the individual people who comprise it. kakashi, though, who a) lives his life by a very different philosophy and b) does understand sasuke’s situation, would not have dealt with the issue like this, and if the village had let him do his job from the beginning, things wouldn’t have gotten to this point in the first place.
kakashi is horrified that tsunade sent a bunch of twelve year-olds out to fight orochimaru’s ninja, and i think he’s also probably angry and/or frustrated about having been ordered out of the village in the first place. he was dealing with the situation before tsunade sent him away. he interrupted the fight between sasuke and naruto even though he himself had literally just gotten out of the hospital, and then he continued addressing the issue with sasuke privately (unlike jiraiya’s non-attempt to address it with naruto, when he said he was going to give naruto a talking-to but actually flaked out). kakashi knew sasuke was struggling, and he was doing all the things a teacher is supposed to do to address it, but then he was ordered away, and even though it was just for two days, it was enough time for everything to go to hell.
if people would just let him do his job - if the administration would let him focus on the task they themselves assigned to him - things would be different. but everybody wants him to do everything. they want him to be everywhere. they want him to protect the nine-tails jinchuriki (who is also kakashi’s dead teacher’s son), and train the last surviving uchiha (which is a task only kakashi and his sharingan can perform), and give equal attention to a third kid, for good measure, and they want him to do it without stepping away from any of his other burdens, all while other people around him constantly frustrate the progress he makes.
so this time, when tsunade tries to send him away, he refuses. he disobeys her orders and walks out of the room. he doesn’t care about the rules or what he’s “legally” obligated to do. he knows what the RIGHT thing to do is, and so he rejects his new mission in favor of rescuing the kids.
i love these moments. i love when we’re shown so clearly the person kakashi has chosen to be - someone who does what’s right, not just what he’s told. he made an active choice many years ago to adopt that philosophy, and he’s been living by those new rules ever since. he’s wiser now than he was when he was a child - sometimes you have to break ranks to do the right thing. sometimes you have to buck the system, even if it means you might face severe personal consequences.
he had one of two choices: either save the mission or his comrades. of course, according to the law of the village, you cannot abandon a mission. but to save the life of his comrades, he put the mission on hold.
kakashi may have spent a good chunk of his childhood trying to reject everything the subject of that story stood for, but none of his attempts to harden his heart ever stuck. he is, in the end, his father’s son.
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